Apache Intranet

Description

LXC containerized Apache webserver, hosted within Proxmox, featuring a fully automated deployment via Ansible

Serving a static HTML page, acting as the Intranet, providing a quick, user accessible way to reach internal only services

Additionally serving as a place to host temporary files within the LAN, and providing a centarlized place to monitor my SSL cert health and expiry dates

Architecture Diagram

                     +----------------+
                     |  Proxmox Host  |
                     +----------------+
                             |
                    +------------------+
                    |Static Apache Page|
                    |      (LXC)       |
                    +------------------+
                       /   |    |    \
                      v    v    v     v
  +------------+ +--------+ +----------------+ +--------+ +------------+
  | Jellyfin   | | Grafana| |Simply Translate| | Calibre| |   Other    |
  |(Bare-Metal)| | (LXC)  | |    (Docker)    | |  (VM)  | |  Services  |
  +------------+ +--------+ +----------------+ +--------+ +------------+

Dependencies

Apache
A reserved or static IP
Any modern browser capable of setting a custom home page
Debian

Creation Notes

I wanted a fast and easy way to access my internal only services without the need to memorize static IPs or set devices to utilize a custom DNS resolver

Consequently I decided to create and configure an LXC containerized Apache instance on my Proxmox server

Apache's function is to serve a static HTML page, acting as the Intranet

The container was given a bridged IP and granted a DHCP reservation

Apache and LXC containerization were chosen due to their extremely low resource requirement

Currently the container is utilizing merely 20MiBs of RAM out of its allocated 64

Once I had coded the page, and pointed Apache to the index file, I modified my Firefox settings to set it as my new homepage

Every time I open my browser this is what I am now greeted with:

File Host

Additionally I decided to utilize Apache's directory sharing features to allow the serving and quick access of files over the LAN

I added this server block to my configuration

Alias /files /var/www/files
    <Directory /var/www/files>
        Options +Indexes
    </Directory>

Breakdown:

The alias maps the subdirectory accessed via the web of /files to the path on my system /var/www/files
+Indexes specifies there isn't a typical index.html file to serve, rather it is a directory listing

After this I created a "jailed user" as detailed in my BashDDNS page

For a brief explanation, a jailed user is a restricted user who's only ability and purpose is to transfer files to a singular directory via SCP

A jailed user has their own dedicated SSH key, restricted SSH permissions, no login shell and a modified chroot directory limiting system visibility

After this, I created a function within my .bashrc file as follows:

send2intra() {
scp -i /path/2/key "$1" jaileduser@192.168.0.70:/files"
}

This allows me to quickly type send2intra image.png in my terminal and have the file transfered to the container, hosted by Apache and available for download within miliseconds

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